A recent Nielsen survey analyzed usage stats for gamers ages 13 and up to find out how the three major home consoles are used. PlayStation 3 fans seem to be taking the “It only does everything” ad tagline to heart.

As you can see from the chart above, PS3 users love watching Blu-rays and DVDs, and tend to tinker with streaming video. The Wii dominates in the gameplay category. This can most certainly be attributed to the fact that the system cannot play DVDs, since streaming video watching is still relatively high. The Xbox 360 leads in online gameplay time investment and barely edges out the PS3 in offline gameplay.

Check out the full preliminary report from Nielsen to see a few more interesting charts and stats.

Gas Powered Games are due to release their Infinite War Battle Pack DLC for Steam and Xbox Live tomorrow. The PC version of the pack will cost £7/€10, and it’ll have new units, maps, and sexy changes to the research tree. The Xbox version just has slightly smaller versions of the maps, and no new experimentals. Awww. The PC patch notes are below:

Structure: The Research Converter turns mass into research points. Got a stack of scrap metal and not much up top? Stick it all in this blender thingy to boost your brain power.

Research: Speed Overdrive – select land units get a burst of speed for an energy cost.

Research: ACU veterancy rate increase.

New Unit: The Super Triton is an Experimental Dreadnought that has a shedload of massive guns, but a much shorter range than regular battleships. It’s the same idea as a shotgun, but much, much bigger. And it floats.

Research: ACU structure build cost decrease.

Research: Structure regeneration.

New Unit: The Jackhammer is a mobile artillery cannon that must ‘unpack’ in order to fire. While unpacked, it has boosted health, but can’t move.

New Unit:: The Field Engineer is a mobile assault bot that can repair other units. It can’t build, reclaim, or capture, but boy can it heal. You’ll want these tailing around behind your bigger experimentals.

Illuminate changes

New Unit: The Sooprizer is an Illuminate gunship that, like the Darkenoid saucer, is a huge direct fire bastard of a thing. Unlike the Darkenoid, it doesn’t have any anti air and can take a beating from the ground.

Structure: The Illuminator is a giant, white plastic phallus that provides temporary vision and radar in a “huge radius”, but suffers from a long cooldown period between activations and a high energy cost. We’ve all been there, buddy.

Research: Tank Torpedo weapon – adds a torpedo launcher to the standard tank so that it can kill boats and submarines.

Research: Amphibious Structures – your buildings can be built on water. Yay, now your massed submarines have a use!

Structure: The Buhbledow is an experimental shield destroyer. It fires an EMP warhead that pops all shields in the impact area, can hit most of the map, but does next to no damage against other units and structures. Which is weird, because buildings and giant robots tend to have electronics in them.

New Unit: Shotja is a hovering sniper robot. It can fire a high-damage round from medium range, but it’s got a long cooldown and slow movement speed. It may or may not be Australian.

Research: “Air Health II”. Does that mean anything to you? I guess, you can unlock more health for air units. Exciting? No. Good for air units? Yes.

Research: Air Teleport – now that’s more like it. Air units can teleport a short distance mid-flight. If they were thinking with portals, they’d teleport to the same place but facing the opposite direction – two bombing runs in one!

Research: Structures can sacrifice themselves to heal nearby units.

Cybran changes

New Unit: The Cybran Monkeylord is back. A big laser with lots of giant legs – what’s not to like?

Structure: The Recycler is a stationary structure that automatically reclaims wreckage and crashed planes in a medium radius. It can’t reclaim living units. Again, I’d like to point out to Gas Powered Games that robots are not necessarily alive.

New Unit: The Cicada is a cloak generator that completely hides every unit around it, but can’t hide itself. It can keep itself running for about a minute before it has to recharge, and that alone makes it more useful than my mobile phone.

Research: After they’ve exploded, your artillery shells can still see the enemy base for a few seconds. That’s pretty weird! Scouting with giant bombs is probably my favourite method of scouting.

New Unit: The Intellitron is a new Cybran air scout unit that has wide vision and radar. It’s quick enough to outrun anti-air, which is, like… super quick. It’s a shame it can’t actually fight, then.

Structure: The Boomerang is a nuclear defense structure that reprograms nukes to send them to their own launch pad. The returning nuke even fails to trigger enemy Anti-Nukes, and the only drawback is its low rate of fire. It’s also the best thing in any game ever.

Research: Upgrade your ACU’s build rate. He builds faster now! The speed at which he builds is also increased, allowing for quicker construction that’ll let you churn out buildings at shorter intervals, and erect defences with GREAT HASTE.

Research: Decrease the time it takes to build air units. See above for copious blather about building things quickly.

A bit of a belter, then. It’s got turrets that hack nukes, ships with jetpacks, floating bases, something that’s a hell of a lot like StarCraft 2’s siege tanks, and a giant blender that turns junk metal into intelligence. We’re also seeing lots of units whose only purpose is to allow the use of one powerful ability which costs energy – the resource that your planes and tanks and boats and buildings also cost to build. Energy generators are about to become a lot more important, then.

Now that SupCom 2 has ships with jetpacks though, should we just give up trying to innovate? I can’t think of a single interesting idea now that I know they’ve put jetpacks on ships. It’s like we’ve mapped the entire possibility space. You could put jetpacks on other things, but they all seem like lesser achievements, you know? What do you think? Where does SupCom 2 go from here?

Arguably the most beautiful car Alfa Romeo has ever produced, the8C Competizioneremembers some of the company’s glorious racing past with its name meaning ‘Competition’, and with 8C referring to its mighty 4.7-liter, 444-horse V8, this is a car that won’t be losing any competitions.

Valve has confirmed that ‘The Sacrifice’, DLC for both Left 4 Dead and Left 4 Dead 2, will be released on October 5 for the PC and Xbox 360. It will be free for both games on the PC, while the Xbox 360 DLC will cost 560 MS Points ($7).

“‘The Sacrifice’ is the prequel to ‘The Passing,’ and takes place from the L4D Survivors’ perspective as they make their way South,” reads the press release. “In addition to advancing the story, ‘The Sacrifice’ introduces a new style finale featuring “Sacrificial Gameplay” where players get to decide who will give their life so the others may live.”

In L4D, ‘The Sacrifice’ will include the campaign and maps playable in Versus a…Go to Source(ShackNews)

Fans of Left 4 Dead 2’s mutations can look forward to a returning mode this week. Survival Versus debuted back in July, and tasks teams with surviving longer than their opponents. As Valve describes:

The first Survivor team sets the time. The second team tries to beat it. Then the first team tries to beat the second team’s time. Then the second team tries to beat the first team’s time. And then the… you get the idea. Rounds keep switching until someone fails to beat the previous time.

If you haven’t popped L4D2 into your 360 recently, this might be a fun reason to dust it off and slay a few (hundred) zombies. Between this mode and Dead Rising 2’s release this week, there should be scores of undead meeting their end this week.

Hey, what do you know? There are some new things coming out this week. Finally! On the games front, we’ve got the latest versions of Dead Rising, Guitar Hero, and Front Mission–in addition to newcomer Battle vs. Chess and the MySims flight-combat game, MySims SkyHeroes. Also, there’s a WiiWare game based on lawn darts. That sounds extremely safe.

The MMO “will have a focus on player politics and social interaction,”Ardulf’s Lair reports (viaMassively), collecting the titbits of information trickling out of the show. Only vampires will be playable, it’s said, though the World of Darkness setting also houses mages, werewolves and other creatures in its dark version of our modern world.

The MMO is based upon White Wolf’s Vampire: The Masquerade–rather than the latest setting, Vam…Go to Source (ShackNews)

Last month, the Xbox 360 sold more hardware than any other system for the first time since 2007. Microsoft managed to pull it off again posting a second straight month of topping the hardware sales, though overall sales were down month to month. The PlayStation 3 was the only console to show gains versus the prior month, but has still not returned to its June sales of 304.8K units. The Wii posted its lowest hardware sales since launch.

U.S. Hardware Sales – reporting August 1 to August 28, 2010

Xbox 360 – 356.7K (down from 443.5K)

Nintendo DS – 342.7K (down from 398.4K)

Wii – 244.3K (down from 253.9K)

PlayStation 3 – 226.0K (up from 214.5K)

PSP – 79.4K (down from 84.0K)

On the software side of things, EA followed last month’s chart topping performance of NCAA Football 11 with strong sales of Madden NFL 11 ac…Go to Source (ShackNews)

It appears that Capcom’s Xbox Live Arcade/Demo experiment has paid off. Today, the publisher revealed that the XBLA-exclusive “prologue experience” Dead Rising 2: Case Zero has “broken all records on Xbox Live” selling more units in one week than “all content” distributed in the downloadable platform’s history.

According to GamerBytes, more than 320,000 users were found on the Dead Rising 2: Case Zero leaderboards seven days after the game launched. According to their estimate, Capcom could have raked roughly $1.15 million for the downloadable prequel. Of course, …Go to Source (ShackNews)

Tecmo Koei says Xbox 360 users will have to wait a little longer before visiting the world of Quantum Theory.

Today the publisher revealed [via press release] a demo for its upcoming shooter will arrive on Xbox Live “later this month,” but would not specify an exact date.

A demo for the game is currently available for the PlayStation 3. In the demo, players control a “hardened warrior” named Syd who has teamed up with the “mysterious” Filena to battle a black material that “infects anything it comes into contact with.”

Activision sends word that playable demos for its two upcoming music games, Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock and DJ Hero 2, are “now available” on Xbox Live–though the DJ Hero 2 demo is not yet online. Expect them to be live sometime today, however.

Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock and DJ Hero 2

The Guitar Hero demo packs four playable tracks within the game’s Quest Mode, narrated by KISS’ Gene Simmons. They are:

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